Student blog: History of Art MA student Natasha working with Hardman & Co’s stained glass drawings

This month I started a weekly placement with the Birmingham Museums Trust, working at the Museum’s Collection Centre to catalogue stained glass drawings by Hardman & Co., a world-renowned manufacturer from Birmingham. After being trained in conservation strategies and the museum’s database, I got to work cataloguing a selection of designs that were sent to America during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. This has already been an incredibly rewarding experience as many Hardman & Co. designs haven’t been unboxed for over a century, have never been digitally catalogued, and so haven’t been widely available outside art and museum contexts!

Working first-hand with these intricate hand-coloured drawings has also led me to reflect upon the global crafts movement and Birmingham’s particular role in the transnational flow of goods during this period – something that is highly relevant to my MA dissertation research on the Victorian transnational Arts and Crafts movement. Stained glass is particularly underexplored in art-historical research, but offers an important touchstone for understanding the role of art in an industrialising society. For example, Hardman’s beautiful gothic-revival style designs can tell us about civic advancement and moral edification in Victorian Birmingham, as well as the inextricable relationship between Britain and empire through colonial subject matter and religious missions overseas at this time.

The more time I spend with these drawings, the more I am tempted to research the industrial and imperial intricacies of Hardman & Co. in a PhD! So far this role has been really eye-opening, and I look forward to the next few months of working with this very special collection of stained glass designs.